Twilight of the Elites and the Rise of the Culture [Uncertain Principles]

In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayess much-discussed book.

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I dont read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. Theyre usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a blackboard, a bunch more on the right, and Then a Miracle Occurs in between. They identify a bunch of features of the current system, a desired end state for some idyllic future society, but are really hazy about how to get from one to the other.

Lots of really smart people have talked up Chris Hayess Twilight of the Elites, though, and some of the synopses I read online made it sound interesting. It certainly touches on a lot of issues of interest in higher education, making it relevant to my interests, so I picked up a copy.

The subtitle is America After Meritocracy, and the central argument is pretty simple: that organizing society around the ideal of meritocracy, where people accrue material rewards on the basis of some innate ability, sounds like a good idea but inevitably leads to a wildly unequal distribution of wealth and power. It works fine for a generation or so, but eventually those who achieve wealth and power in one generation begin to use their wealth and power to tilt the distribution of wealth and power in favor of their own interests, and in particular, those of their children.

This takes a lot of forms, and Hayes gives a bunch of different examples. The most relevant to discussions of higher education are magnet schools and the like, which started out as a way to allow lower-class students to get the benefits of elite education just by scoring well on some simple tests of ability. The massive test-prep industry thats sprung up around these exams, however, makes it all but impossible for a student with good innate ability but few family resources to compete with students from wealthier families, who can afford extra tutoring and test prep classes and all that. As a result, elite educational institutions have become more skewed toward the children of the current elite classes.

The discussion of the basic problem and its origin is admirably clear and readable, and there are other supporting examples as well. But this is where the book gets frustrating, because while Hayes does a great job pointing out whats wrong, I didnt find the book very helpful in terms of suggesting an alternative.

Having built a reasonably convincing case that the way we currently organize our society is producing a problematic level of inequality, Hayes tries to talk about a way forward, but that section of the book pretty much falls flat. The most he manages is to point to the Tea Party on the political right and the Occupy movement on the political left, and argue that both of these can be seen as reactions to the current plight of the middle class that economic mobility has dramatically decreased, which is scary to a lot of people, and that those fears manifest in the two different angry protest movements. While neither by itself is enough to force a solution to the inequality problem, he speculates that some vague future shcok to the economic system might somehow get them to align their goals. After this miracle occurs, progress!

There are a whole bunch of problems with this, starting with the way he ignores the creepy racist element thats fairly prominent in the Tea Party movement, which is a dramatic obstacle to any reconciliation between the Tea Party and the much more diverse Occupy crowd. Theres also the problem that the sort of reorganization his book seems to suggest would be required would require a lot more sacrifice from the Tea Party in terms of the stated goals of the organization theyre very explicitly opposed to large-scale societal redistribution of resources. And on top of those issues, theres the lack of specificity about what kind of shock might happen to bring them together.

So, as I said, frustrating.

See the rest here:
Twilight of the Elites and the Rise of the Culture [Uncertain Principles]